MEDIAPRO Chooses EVS Technology

EVS, a leader in instant tapeless solutions for live and near-live productions, has been chosen by MEDIAPRO for the production and playout of GOLTV, its new HD sports channel.
MEDIAPRO provides a whole range of different services in the audiovisual content production sector and in sports and cinema rights management. It has become one of the leading players in the European audiovisual market.
Recently, it launched a new premium paid television channel called GOLTV. This new sports channel targets football fans, providing them with live broadcasts, match highlights, news bulletins and all the goals from around the world.
MEDIAPRO obtained rights to the world's most important leagues, including coverage of the Liga Española (Spanish First Division) and the English Premier League, a variety of UEFA Cup matches, as well as World Cup 2010 qualifying matches. All of these are currently recorded in HD and simultaneously broadcasted in SD and HD on GOLTV.
GOLTV is produced in the recently inaugurated MEDIAPRO/Imagina facility in Barcelona and broadcasted from another nearby MEDIAPRO facility. MEDIAPRO required a HD production set up for the centre, in which the workflow needed to be fast and integrated with third party equipment for statistics, graphics, post-production and archive systems.
Gérard Romy, Managing Director of MEDIAPRO, said: "MEDIAPRO's decision to work with EVS for the GOLTV set up is essentially due to years of successful collaboration and the limited time we had. Nonetheless, EVS' service and the evolution of its technology in terms of third-part integration, as well as the ability it provides to access and immediately control any content for instant production or transferring to post-production were probably just as critical. Furthermore, the scale of the project and the possibility to carry out further developments in the future were also significant factors."
EVS provided MEDIAPRO with 7 HD XT(2) (6 channels) production servers for the ingest of up to 28 incoming feeds; a central storage infrastructure with a fiber channel fabric topology and a capacity of 30TB; 27 IPDirector workstations for ingest, logging, browsing and playout control features; 4 MulticamLSMs for live editing (clipping) and highlights creation; 12 HD CleanEdit workstations (non-linear editing system) for news and highlights editing; and 2 HD XT(2) (4 channels) servers controlled by the VSN Multicom Automation Systems for the playout of GOLTV.
Marc Caeymaex, Manager of EVS Iberica, said: "The GOLTV set up is a wonderful example of EVS' capability in a studio production environment, as the entirety of our product range is represented."
Unitecnic, MEDIAPRO's technical support and engineering company, managed the installation for this project. Caeymaex added: "We have found a strong partner in Unitecnic, on which we could comfortably rely to deploy such a massive HD installation. The GOLTV project is complex, not only because it relates to HD, but also because it implies significant movements of files (entire football matches) through a complex IT infrastructure between production and playout sites.
Further information is available at: www.unitecnic.com and www.evs.tv.
(KMcA)